This Mom Wants to Teach Her Daughters About Sex By Giving Them Vibrators

In a world where female pleasure is stigmatized and there's a well-documented gap between how often men and women have orgasms, what's a sex-positive mom to do?

For writer Stephanie Land, the answer is simple: Give your daughter a vibrator and a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Land's philosophy is currently going viral thanks to an article she wrote for SheKnows called "If we don't want our daughter to have sex, we owe them their own vibrators." 

In the piece, Land discusses the double standard between how boys and girls experience sexual discovery. She writes:

Boys, with their access to pornographic material, expect girls they have sex with to enjoy it like the women in the films do. Girls, wanting boys to like them, agree to sexual acts that are well beyond their maturity level, and often ones a lot of grown women don't find pleasurable.

In an email interview, Land said that the article was mostly born out of frustration with how often teen girls wind up engaging in sexual activity that is "mainly for the enjoyment of males." "The absence of self-pleasure sets girls up for engaging in sex at an earlier age, without knowledge of how their bodies work," she said.

So she decided to propose a simple solution: Encourage girls to masturbate (preferably with a sick vibe), and teach them from a young age that their bodies are capable of actually delivering intense pleasure during sex — to which they are entitled.

"Wouldn't an eager boy's erection be a little less tempting (if it's tempting at all) when countered with knowledge of what good sex could really feel like?" Land asks in the piece.

Needless to say, the idea that a mom would give her daughter a vibrator as a gift has been met with some criticism from more conservative parents. One Australian blogger wrote that "it's bordering on 'creepy' and sitting firmly in 'invasive' for [her] to want to micromanage [her] daughter's sexual experimentation to this level."

But Land's claim that girls are at a disadvantage in the first place isn't unfounded. There is plenty of research suggesting that women who sleep with men aren't always getting orgasms out of the deal. One 2015 survey found that only 57% of women report regularly orgasming during sex, as compared to 95% of men.

It does seem that female pleasure is slowly becoming less taboo, with plenty of women now boldly speaking out about the importance of equal-opportunity orgasming. Between that and Land's sex-positive school of parenting, the future looks bright for the female orgasm. And also for the vibrator industry.

h/t SheKnows